Go here to read about it online. The author's thesis is that we now have a ruling class so insulated from the experience of everyday Americans that they "make their judgements about what's good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives."
I took the 25-question quiz and scored 54:
Here are the scores that you could expect to get if you fit the following descriptions.
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A lifelong resident of a working-class neighborhood with average television and moviegoing habits.
Range: 48–99. Typical: 77.
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A first-generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and moviegoing habits.
Range: 42–100. Typical: 66.
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A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents.
Range: 11–80. Typical: 33.
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A second-generation (or more)upper-middle-class person who has made a point of getting out a lot.
Range: 0–43. Typical: 9.
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A second- generation (or more) upper-middle-class person with the television and moviegoing habits of the upper middle class.
Range: 0–20.Typical: 2.
I'm somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd categories, and my score matches that. This quiz is worth every cent you paid for it, and it's good if it causes you to think about your life experiences as they relate to others'.
Hey, that was really interesting. Since I grew up in Bakersfield and Santa Maria, my score was pretty high...
ReplyDeleteCharles Murray's book is - or should be - a watershed moment in history. It was excerpted in last weekend's WSJ, and David Brooks wrote an excellent commentary on it as well.
ReplyDeletehttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html
57 ... living in a small town in the Midwest will do that to you. :)
ReplyDeleteI was particularly amused by the idea that this is a new phenomenon. In case no one has noticed, there are some very old families who have never ventured out of their closed little worlds in many years. The Kennedys and the Bushes strike me as excellent examples.
ReplyDeleteI taught the scions of families like these at one point in my career and they really had no clue as to the real world. As an example, one family drove up from Long Island in his and her Rolls Royces (the chauffeurs had the weekend off) and their high school aged kid had never known anyone whose family wasn't millionaires. It was unimaginable to him, for example, that a girl wouldn't be excited about her debutante ball. After all, he reasoned, all the men would be wearing dinner jackets and all the women new designer dresses and "Wouldn't that be fun?"
Poverty was for servants.
Got a 50 thanks to my upbringing. Lost some points on that Air Force rank insignia - never got those straight.
ReplyDeleteI quite TV quite a few years ago which cost a lot of points.
Have you ever belonged to a union would have been a good one.
70. Being in the military and having come from a long line of farmers helped a lot. My parents were the first in both their families leave the farm, to go to college, to leave a 40-square mile area around Green Bay, and the first to have white collar jobs.
ReplyDeleteScored a 62. Grew up in a town with a population less than 10,000...military service was also a plus for me.
ReplyDelete